I ran into this issue a few months ago, on a cross-platform project involving four languages that each take a distinctly different view about strings from the other three. Although this situation is a common objection to supporting strings in the issue thread, it took just a couple of hours to extend msgpack to support strings in a reasonable-enough-for-me way on each platform.
The proposals in the thread are a lot better than mine. And I suppose it's pretty antisocial / arrogant for me to just roll my own implementation without consulting anybody. But in three years[0] of talking about the problem, nothing had gotten done. Meanwhile, my code shipped a long time ago.
I do this a lot--fork people's projects to solve my problems and don't merge back changes--and I feel guilty for not being more participatory with the project maintainers. But the fact is that the expected cost of getting embroiled in a flamewar like this is high (whether it is over architecture, whitespace convention, "behavior by design", "Jim's already working on that", etc.), whereas the benefit to me of getting my changes merged upstream is essentially zero. So my antisocial behavior continues to be positively reinforced.
Does anyone else have this problem? Or do people just enjoy flamewars more than I do, or have the persuasive skills to avoid them?